Plants slowly dying with LED hood.

I'm giving up on my attempt to grow low-light plants with the standard 10gal Marineland LED hood. I even tried to enhance it by adding another string of 24LEDs to no avail. I really like the hinged hood and the way it lights up the tank, but for plants? Not so much. They're slowly falling apart. We're talking basic low-light plants; Java Fern, Anubias Nana, Anacharis and Amazon Sword.

I did research this prior to buying this 10gal kit, but found no conclusive info on growing plants with it. I love the idea of LEDs. Lots of light, no heat, little/no power consumption and they make the tank look great. In order to grow plants with them, you really have to do your homework and spend some bucks.

I don't want to give up on the plants in this particular tank, so I bit the bullet and mail-ordered an Aqueon 20" incandescent strip light, a 20" Versa-Top and two Zoo Med day light 6500K CFLs. There's really no 20" twin-tube T5 strip lights that I could find.

Another ~$59 chalked up to the hobby.

Hello Daniela.

The plants have been in there for about 7 weeks. I keep the LED hood on for ~12hrs a day. I have FloraMax in this tank for substrate. Only the amazon sword is planted in the substarte. everything else is fixed to something to keep it at the bottom. Roots have grown on the anubias nana, but no leaf growth. Same with everything else. The Java Ferns look terrible too.

FWIW, I mailed-ordered the new hood, cover & bulbs from Petco. Hated to do it because I really like this LED hood! Oh well, I'll save it for another 10gal!

Edit- Yes, CFL = compact fluorescent light. I'm using those in the incandescent hood. Google Zoo Med CFL or the likes.

stephcps said:

I have the marineland double bright LED on a 10 and a 20 and have had no trouble with low light plants. I imagine though the single bright would not be able to cut it.

Click to expand...

Good info!

I see that you can get an 18-24" one for ~$60. I considered that too, but couldn't find a lot of info in regards using them on small freshwater tanks for growing low light plants. That would have been about $80 for me including a glass vera-top... BUT you don't have to worry about re-lamping them once a year. Big cost savings.

I thought about that. Given I've already tried to 'improve' my Marineland LED hood by adding 24 more eBay LEDs, I'll probably just keep it as is and use the Marineland LED hood for a quarantine tank some day.

It would take some doing to remove the LEDs from the marineland light pod anyway. They're all housed in a black plastic rectangle.

You could strip-out the LEDs from my 29gal Top Fin hood very easily. That's a totally different design. I'm going to keep that tank live plant free for now.